Cassandra's Legacy

Thursday, December 8, 2016

John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth, in 1962. It was the start of the adventure that led to the lunar landing in 1969; only seven years later. It was an age of enthusiasm and of great expectations; a time that, today, looks remote. The conquest of space may have been made possible by the high energy yield of fossil fuels that made us rich. But it is a wealth that we don't have anymore; the depletion of the high yield fossil resources is making us unable to afford the kind of extravagances that were possible decades ago. So, the death of John Glenn may signal the end of the cycle of human spaceflight.

On this occasion, I thought I could reproduce a post that I published on Cassandra's Legacy in 2015. It may not be unrelated to the general decline of the concept of human spaceflight that the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was criticized in Italy on the basis of the idea that women should stay home and have children.

The last astronaut: the cycle of human spaceflight is coming to an end (Feb 9, 2015)

Smart, dedicated, competent, polyglot, and more; Samantha Cristoforetti seems to have been invented for a "Star Trek" episode. She is shown here at the International Space Station, where she is staying at the moment of publication of this post. Cristoforetti may not be the last astronaut to orbit the earth, but it is possible that the end of what was once called "the space age" will not be far away in the future. (imagecredit: ESA/NASA)

I experienced the enthusiasm of the "space age," starting in the 1960s, and I am not happy to see the end of that old dream. Yet, the data are clear and cannot be ignored: human spaceflight is winding down. Look at the graph, below. It shows the total number of people launched into space each year. (The data are from Wikipedia - more details.)

As you see, the number of people sent to space peaked in the 1990s, following a cycle that can be fitted reasonably well using a bell-shaped curve (a Gaussian, in this case). We have not yet arrived at the end of space travel, but the number of people traveling to space is going down. With the international space station set to be retired in 2020, it may be that the "space age" is destined to come to an end in a non-remote future.

The shape of the cycle can be seen as a "Hubbert curve." This curve typically describes the exploitation of a non-renewable resource; fossil fuels in particular, but it also describes how economic activities are affected by a diminishing availability of resources. In this case, the shape of the curve suggests that we are gradually running out of the surplus resources needed to send humans into space. In a sense, the economics of human spaceflight are like those of the great pyramids of Egypt. These pyramids were expensive and required considerable surplus resources to be built. When the surplus disappeared, no more were built. The shape of the pyramid building curve was, again, Hubbert-like.

This result is not surprising, considering that we are reaching the planetary limits to growth. In part, we are reacting to the diminishing availability of resources by replacing humans with less expensive robots, but sending robots to space is not the same as the "conquest of space" was once conceived. Besides, the decline of space exploration is evident also from other data, see for instance this plot showing the budget available to NASA (from "Starts with a Bang").Note how the peak in human spaceflights coincides with the peak in the resources destined to space exploration.

If space exploration is directly related to the availability of resources, it is also true that, from the beginning, it was not meant to be just a resource drain. The idea of the conquest of space involved overcoming the limits of the earth's ecosphere and accessing the resources of the whole solar system. Some of the concepts developed in this area were thought explicitly as ways to avoid the dire scenarios laid out in the 1972 study, "The Limits to Growth." Proposals involved placing giant habitats at the Lagrange libration points, where no energy was necessary to keep them there. The idea gained some traction in the 1970s and, in the figure, you see an impression of one of those habitats - the "Bernal Sphere."(image credit: NASA)

Today, we can't look at these old drawings without shaking our heads and wondering how anyone could take them seriously. Yet, these ideas were not impossible in themselves and, in the 1970s, we still had sufficient resources to make it possible some kind of human expansion into space, even though not on the grand scale that some people were proposing. But we missed that occasion and we much preferred to invest our surplus in military toys. Today, we can't even dream of colonizing space anymore.

The space age is not completely over, yet, but it is becoming more and more difficult to sustain the costs of it. Right now, the Russians are still willing to launch to orbit West European astronauts. But how long will they continue to do so while Western Europe is enacting sanctions devised to cripple the Russian economy? Samantha Cristoforetti, brave and competent Italian astronaut, may well be a member of the last patrol of humans orbiting around the earth for a long time to come.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Matteo Renzi, Italy's prime minister, portraited as Napoleon Bonaparte on the front cover of an Italian magazine of a few years ago. For some reason, successful leaders tend to embark in risky enterprises that put their leadership at stake and, often, they fail utterly. It happened to Napoleon with the invasion of Russia and it happened to Matteo Renzi with the recent constitutional referendum that ended up with a disastrous defeat for him.

There is a clear parallel between the results of the Italian constitutional referendum of Dec 4th, 2016 and those of the Brexit referendum and the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the US. In all cases, we saw devastating failures for the mainstream media. People refused to listen to the messages beamed to them. They had the feeling of being swindled and probably they knew that, when you start suspecting that you are being swindled, you probably are. And they reacted accordingly.

Something is deeply changing in the world. Top-down, government-controlled propaganda has been used with great efficacy for more than a century, but now it is being defeated by bottom-up, viral information that ebbs and flows in the Web. Is it a good thing? For sure, the defeat of the Empire of lies is a good thing, but it is also true that the opposite of a lie is not necessarily the truth. All we can say is that it is happening and that the old ways don't work anymore.

On this point, perhaps it is worth re-reading Tolstoy when he describes the surprise that Napoleon felt at the battle of Borodino, during the Russian campaign, when he, too, found that the old ways didn't work anymore.

_________________________________

Alexander Tolstoy: "War and Peace", Book 10, Chapter XXXIV

Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an ever-lucky gambler who, after recklessly flinging money about and always winning, suddenly just when he has calculated all the chances of the game, finds that the more he considers his play the more surely he loses.

His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations had been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation courte et energique, he himself was still the same: he knew that and knew that he was now even more experienced and skillful than before. Even the enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland- yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent.

All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break the enemy's line, and a cavalry attack by "the men of iron," all these methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory, but from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded, of reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the Russians, and of disorganization among his own troops.

Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a few phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with congratulations and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the corps of prisoners, bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and stores, and Murat had only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather in the baggage wagons. So it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena, Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on. But now something strange was happening to his troops.

Despite news of the capture of the fleches, Napoleon saw that this was not the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former battles. He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about him experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and they all shunned one another's eyes- only a de Beausset could fail to grasp the meaning of what was happening.

But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of a battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all efforts had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that the least accident might now- with the fight balanced on such a strained center- destroy him and his army.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

With more than 50.000 students, the University of Florence, in Italy, is a huge organization with plenty of problems. But it is also an ancient and prestigious university that, sometimes, manages to do something right. Recently, it organized an information day on climate change for its employees that was remarkably successful, showing that trust begets trust.

Why are we failing at communicating the danger of climate change? Maybe people don't have enough information? (This is the "information deficit" model). Or maybe they have too much information? (This is called the "cultural cognition" model). Or maybe they are not getting the right information? Or there is something else that's wrong?

Without going into the details of the debate, let me tell you of an event that was an eye-opening experience for me. It made me understand that there is such a thing as an "information deficit" problem, but also that things are not as simple as that. I think that more than an information deficit, there is a "trust deficit" that blocks communication. It is not enough to tell people how things stand: we need to generate trust. And trust begets trust. But let me tell you the story.

This year, the University of Florence decided to offer to its personnel - the employees working in the administration or in services - three "information days" on matters related to sustainability. One of these information days was dedicated to climate change and was held on Nov 9th, 2016. I was one of the organizers, so I followed the event from the beginning.

The first point is that this was supposed to be a class; not a vacation day: there would be several talks for a total of about eight hours and we planned them as real, university-level lessons. We had climate modeling, paleoclimatology, climate negotiations, communication, mitigation, adaptation, and more. It was communication directed to non-scientists, but the speakers were all specialists in their fields and they made no attempt of sweetening the pill or of trivializing the subject.

To be honest, I wasn't sure that it would have worked. I was afraid that people would take the initiative as an excuse for a day of vacation; that they wouldn't show up, or show up and disappear shortly afterward. Or, if they were to stay, they would be bored to death and sleep throughout the day. I was even expecting that some idiot in the audience would stand up and say something like "don't you see how cold it is today? Climate change is a hoax!"

But nothing like that happened. With a certain surprise on my part, the aula magna of the University of Florence was crammed full with some two hundred people, mostly university employees, but also students and faculty members. Most of them bravely sat through the 8 hours of talks, a remarkable feat (at some moments, some of them had to stand because there were not enough seats available). And not only they sat in the room; they listened to the talks. After much experience with public talks and lessons, I can sense whether the audience is attentive or not, and they were. They were not sleeping. Actually, I detected some closed eyes, occasionally, - it is normal. But, on the whole, I would say that they were more attentive than many of my students.

We made no attempt of a formal evaluation of the results of this initiative, but I think I have sufficient informal feedback to be able to tell you that the message got through. Many people were not just interested, they were amazed. They had no idea that climate science was such a deep, wide, and fascinating field. They had never realized the extent of the threat we are facing.

For me, as I said, it was an eye-opening experience that made me re-evaluate everything I knew about scientific communication. It made me understand how remote climate science is for the people who, really, suffer from an information deficit problem. Most people who are not scientists get their information from the mainstream media (MSM) and there are two problems with that: one is that they only get snippets and glimpses, drowned in the general noise of the news. The other, perhaps more important, is that they correctly mistrust the MSM. Yet, where else can they get information from? It is truly a deadly combination: bad information from a mistrusted source: any wonder that nobody is doing anything about climate change?

And here comes the university; an institution full of problems but that's supposed to exist in order to create science and culture, not to make money. Because of this, it enjoys a certain prestige and, this time, it used it to do something right. It told to its employees, "we value you, so we offer to you our knowledge about climate science for free. We trust that you will appreciate it." And the employees responded by reciprocating the trust and appreciating this gift. Trust begets trust.

I think this experience has a general value. It agrees with a fact that is described, for instance, by Ara Norenzayan in his book "Big Gods". Simply stated, people will believe a message if (and only if) they believe the messenger. So, no wonder that people are not much moved by the messages on climate change that they receive by the MSM - not only they are receiving a garbled message, they don't believe the messenger. But when they receive the message from a trusted institution and from people who, clearly, are doing their best to inform them, then they understand. It is not a question of volume, not a question of sweetening the pill, not a question of public relation strategies. It is a question of trust.

And here lies the problem: we have squandered so much of the trust that the public had in its sources of information that we live squarely in an "Empire of Lies". Will we ever be able to restore trust? Perhaps not impossible, but very, very difficult. Still, what the University of Florence did was a step in the right direction. Maybe it can be replicated and then, who knows?

I would like to thank all those who participated in this information day as speakers or organizers, in alphabetic order.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

The peak for conventional crude production arrived between 2008 and 2011. It seems that we passed the peak for "all liquids" in 2015, even though it will take some more time to be sure that an irreversible decline trend has started. Of course, reaching the peak has generated a vehement denial that the peak even exists. In this article, Eugene Marner comments on how and why the presidential elections completely ignored the hard facts of the declining net energy supply from fossil fuels. (Image from "The Victory Report")

Here in the USA, we held an election recently that left most surprised, many dismayed, and many others eager to explain what happened, why it happened and what we do now. Lots of deep thinking and heavy breathing have gone into those analyses and I don’t mean to compete here with students of history and politics. I would, however, like to offer what I think may be an important part of the context for recent events, a context that is defined and enforced by geology and physics. I suggest that the election of 2016 can be called the Peak Oil Election, although the issue certainly never came up in public.

Back in November 2000, The Daily Star published a guest commentary in which I wrote about peak oil, the moment when global production of oil reaches its maximum and starts its inevitable decline. I had hoped to rouse people to think about the grave consequences that would ensue when oil, the key resource that fuels and supports our civilization, is no longer widely and cheaply available. Clearly that didn’t work very well, as most people still don’t have any idea what peak oil means, much less that its consequences are unfolding around us right now. No doubt our media, always complicit in a corporate agenda (oil companies are big advertisers), have not done much to inform the public but, more alarming than the blithe disregard of the population at large, is the apparently total cluelessness of both the two major presidential candidates and most of their advisers and entourages as well as the Congress. The Army Corps of Engineers issued a report back in September 2005 called Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations that sounded the alarm about peak oil coming soon but that didn’t get much attention, either.

The economy is widely acknowledged to be the critical factor in most elections. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, like most politicians everywhere, talked and continue to talk about “economic growth.” Voters can forgive scandals, bigotry, nastiness, stupidity and just about everything else but, when they see their standard of living falling, their jobs vanishing, their children with no future (and sometimes with nothing to eat), they blame politicians, rightly or wrongly. Politicians usually pretend to have solutions that almost always involve some path or other to “growth.”

Although none of us alive today can remember a time when economic growth was not part of our expectation for the future, such growth has only been conceived of for about the last 200 years. Until fossil fuels became the energy that powered the Industrial Revolution, economies grew by making war on their neighbors and taking their wealth. That was the stuff of history: empires rose on the principal of capturing territory and exacting tribute and eventually collapsed under the weight of their military costs and the expense of hauling all the loot back home.

Europeans had nearly exhausted the resources of their corner of the Eurasian landmass when Columbus came upon what was called the New World. Of course, it was just as old as every other place and, contrary to the persistent mythology, was not empty but chock full of animals, plants and, yes, many millions of human beings living in complex cultures. For the next three centuries, first the Spanish and Portuguese and, soon after, the Dutch, French and English crossed the Atlantic to subdue, conquer, and kill off the inhabitants in order, in traditional imperial fashion, to steal their stuff. Europe became rich again. That was how growth was done before about 1800 and the beginning of the fossil fuel age.

From the beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was powered by coal, which was dirty but had much higher energy content than wood and charcoal, the main fuels that humans had used until then. In 1859, a hustler who called himself “Colonel” Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially viable oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania and the petroleum age began. Oil is an incomparable fuel: at the beginning it was easily extracted, easily transported and, best of all, a single gallon of oil contains as much energy as a fit man working hard for three months or about 700 men working for an hour. One gallon. That huge amount of energy suddenly available is what gave rise to what we now call “economic growth.” More production and consumption requires more energy inputs and oil made it possible. But on a finite planet, nothing can go on forever and, by the 1960s, oil companies were finding less new oil each year than we were burning. Thus, about 40 years later, peak oil. Coal and gas will continue to be available for a while, but both will start to decline within a decade or two. Both already have serious financial problems, and neither one can do what oil does.

Let me return to why I called this the Peak Oil Election. Neither candidate spoke about it. Perhaps they don’t know about it. Or if they do, don’t want to believe it. Or maybe no politician can get elected by promising that the economy will continue to contract and energy supplies become ever scarcer. It was the Peak Oil Election because peak oil defeated both of them. Without increasing energy consumption, there can be no economic growth and, without increasing supplies, there can be no increase in energy consumption. The so-called renewables are hopelessly dependent upon fossil fuels for manufacture, installation and maintenance and are much less energy-intensive than fossil fuels.

The fact is that because oil production cannot be increased, economic growth is now over. Donald Trump’s promise to bring back coal production, increase all fossil fuel extraction and rebuild manufacturing are simply not going to happen, not because of Trump but because policy is no longer in charge. From now on, geology and physics call the shots. The remaining oil is too expensive to get to and extract. Oil companies can’t make a profit at a price that customers in a contracting economy can afford to pay. The growth game is finished as will be soon the multitude of financial frauds that, starting with the peak of United States oil production in 1970, have come to comprise much of our economy.

We need a new sort of politics and economy: local, cooperative, community-based, low-energy, conservationist, non-polluting, an economy that sustainably supports biological needs and health, rather than pursuing riches. I don’t think any politicians are going to do that for us; we need to do it for ourselves.

In Genesis 3:19, God instructs Adam that his punishment for disobedience will be “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Apparently, humans didn’t like that very much, as all of history reveals them trying to get around that decree by any means possible: forcing others to do the work (slavery), getting rich and hiring others to do the work (wage slavery), or by burning oil (energy slavery). The time is here again for community cooperation, for low-tech solutions like the power of oxen, horses and mules, for relatively inexpensive simple technologies that can be made locally, like hoes, scythes, and pitchforks, and for the sweat of our faces. This isn’t a matter of virtue but of necessity; a simpler life is coming whether or not we choose to embrace it.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 movie: "Breakfast at Tiffany's." From the title of the film, I take the concept of "Tiffany's fallacy": it is not enough to see jewels on the other side of the window to have them. You have to pay for them. The same is true with mineral resources. There may be plenty of oil reserves on paper, but if you want them, you have to pay for their extraction. What follows is a slightly modified excerpt from my upcoming book "The Seneca Effect."

In the debates that deal with energy and fossil fuels, it is rather common to read or hear statements such as “oil will last for 50 years at the current rate of production.” You can also hear that “we still have one thousand years of coal” (Donald Trump stated exactly that during the US presidential campaign of 2016). When these statements are uttered at a conference, you can sometimes hear the sigh of relief of the audience, the more pronounced, the surer the speaker appears to be. This reaction is understandable if the assessment of a long duration of fossil fuels were to correspond to what we can expect for the future. But can we, really?

The essence of propaganda, as it is well-known, is not so much telling lies, but presenting only one aspect of the truth. That's true also for the depletion debate. Saying that a certain resource will last decades, centuries, or more is not a lie, but not the truth, either. These numbers are based on only one aspect of the problem and on highly simplified assumptions. It is the concept of “reserves to production ratio” (R/P), a number that gives you a duration in years of the resource, supposing that the amount of reserves is known and that extraction will continue at the current rates. Normally, the results of these estimates have a comfortable ring to it. According to the 2016 BP report, the global R/P ratio for crude oil calculated for “proven reserves” was around 50 years, that for natural gas about the same, whereas coal was found to have an R/P ratio of more than a hundred years. If the “possible reserves” are added to the estimate, coal turns out to have an R/P ratio of the order one thousand years or even more.

Most people understand from these data that there is nothing to be worried about oil for at least 50 years and, by then, it will be someone else's problem. And, if we really have a thousand years of coal, then what's the fuss about? Add to this the fact that the R/P ratio has been increasing over the years and you understand the reasons for a rather well-known statement by Peter Odell, who said in 2001 that we are “running into oil” rather than "running out" of it. In this vision, extracting a mineral resource is a little like eating a pie. As long as you have some pie left, there is nothing to be worried about. Actually, the peculiar pie that's crude oil has the characteristic that it becomes bigger as you eat it.

If that sounds too good to you, you are right; this optimistic vision that sees mineral resources as a pie is also firmly placing it in the sky. Just to raise a nagging question, let me cite a report that appeared in 2016 on Bloomberg (not exactly a den of Cassandras), titled “”Oil Discoveries at a 70-year low”.

The data show that the amount of oil discovered during the past decades is way below the amount that's being produced, an assessment that is not changed by some recent, much publicized and overemphasized, discoveries. The situation is about the same with most mineral resources; the R/P ratios keep producing reassuring values: decades of availability, at least. But the number of discoveries keeps diminishing, well below the replacement rate that would be needed to keep production ongoing. See, for instance, this figure, courtesy of André Diederen

So, what's going on, here? If these resources are there, how come that we can't find them? Is this a conspiracy of the oil companies to keep oil prices high? A hoax that the Greens propagate in order to get people to vote for them? An attempt by a cabal of evil scientists who are aiming at obtaining research grants for their depletion studies? If one of these is the case, the coalition of these mighty powers seems to have been especially inept because the past few years have seen oil prices collapsing. But the crude oil world is especially ripe with conspiracy theories; including the one that sees oil as “abiotic” and being continuously formed in enormous amounts in the depths of the Earth – a “fact” that everyone would know were it not for the conspiracy of the oil companies, the Greens, the scientists, etc. That's just one of the many legends pervading the Internet. Just one more expression of our teleological approach to problems that consists in finding evil human agents for explaining them.

But there is no cabal, no hoax, no conspiracy in the estimates of oil and of other mineral resources. The problem is that using the R/P data to assess the future of mineral resources is misleading and it may easily lead you to a dangerous feeling of complacency. It is something that I call “Tiffany’s fallacy”. You probably remember the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” that features the character played by Audrey Hepburn having breakfast while looking at the jewels on display in Tiffany’s windows. There is no doubt that there is plenty of gold on the other side of the glass, but it would be a fallacy to assume that one is rich just because of that. To get that gold, one must pay for it (or use dangerous and risky methods to get it). That’s the problem with the industry statistical estimates of “reserves.” These reserves are there, probably, but it takes money (and a lot of it) to find them, extract them, and process them. And it is not just a question of money, it takes material resources to extract minerals: drills, trucks, rigs, and every sort of equipment, including transportation and, of course, people able to use all of it. These are things that cannot simply be printed or obtained by magic financial tricks such as “quantitative easing”.

Mineral resources are nothing like a pie that you can eat until you have some of it. They are more like Tiffany's jewelry that you may get only if you have the money to pay for it. And the price of any commodity is directly related to its cost. It costs money to produce anything and nothing is produced if it can’t return a profit when it is sold on the market. So, in the case of minerals, extraction costs keep increasing because, of course, we extract the cheapest resources first. At some moment, we may find that we cannot afford anymore to pay for these costs. And when something costs more than what you can afford, you may as well say that you "ran out" of it, no matter what you read in terms of reserves that should exist somewhere underground. The mineral pie is shrinking and most of what's left is in the sky.

As our new President will do - DRILL BABY DRILL!!! Energy independence - that sure has a nice ring to it. Middle finger to Middle East arabs.

...

I remember in the late 70's when scientists said we would be running out of oil by the late 90's. I wonder where those scientists are working now? Climate change?

...

They are constantly finding more
reserves. President Trump will open up more land and ocean for safe
drilling. Something the Obama administration had no clue how to do..

...

but of course the Radical Left,
determined to return all of western civilization to the hunter-gatherer
society of 10,000 years ago will do all it can to prevent this once
great nation from becoming energy dependent and permanently kicking the
barbarian raghead arab oil nations out of this country.

Great fun, and all fact-free! But let's suppose, for once, that facts mattered. What should we say about the "Largest Oil Deposit Ever Found in the US"? One point is that nothing new was "found;" the Wolfcamp formation was well known and already being exploited. The USGS just made a new estimate; probably valid within the assumptions made; but it is just that: an estimate. It doesn't mean that these resources have been discovered (note that the USGS explicitly says "undiscovered.") So, what all this means is that, statistically, these resources should be there, but nobody can be completely sure and it wouldn't be the first time that these estimates turn out to be optimistic. (in this case, the round number "20" is more than a little suspicious).

But never mind that; let's assume that these 20 billion barrels are there for real. How does this amount stack up in comparison with the world's oil situation? Here are some data, taken from Bloomberg (not exactly a den of Cassandras).

Let's compare these data with the world's oil consumption that, according to "Index Mundi," is today a little more than 33 billion barrels per year. So, you see from the figure that, during the past decade at least, we have been consistently burning more oil than we could discover. Now, if there had been other major discoveries this year, they would have been trumpeted enough that we would know of them. So, adding the 20 billion barrels of the Wolfcamp formation to the meager total of 2016, probably, we still don't reach a total of 33 billion. In the end, all that we can say is that, for this year, oil discoveries were just a little less, rather than much less, than what the world has consumed. These would be the news, if facts mattered.

But, that's not even the point: the essence of depletion is not how much of it there is, it is how much it costs to extract it. Here, Arthur Berman notes that Bloomberg had calculated the value of this "treasure" at $900 billion as if "if the oil magically leaped out of the ground without the cost of drilling and completing wells; if there were no operating costs to produce it; if there were no taxes and no royalties." Then, Berman calculates how much it would cost to extract all this "bonanza" of oil and concludes that, at the current prices, it would result in a net loss of some $500 billion.

So, aren't you happy to live in a fact-free world? You can keep thinking that it is enough to poke a few holes in the ground to see it gush out in never ending abundance because, as everyone knows, it is really "abiotic." Sure, and you can also walk on thin air, as Wile E. Coyote can do as long as he doesn't realize he does.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Jay Wright Forrester (1918-2016) may have been the source of inspiration for Hari Seldon, a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In Asimov's novels, Seldon develops "pyschohistoric equations" that allow him to predict the impending collapse of the Galactic Empire. In the real world, Forrester developed "system dynamics equations" that allowed him to predict the impending collapse of the modern human civilization. The predictions were ignored by the Imperial powers of both the fictional and the real universe.

Jay Forrester, one of the great minds of the 20th century, died at 98, a few days ago. His career was long and fruitful, and we can say that his work changed the intellectual story of humankind in various ways, in particular for the role he had in the birth of the Club of Rome's report "The Limits to Growth"

In 1969, Forrester was a faculty member of the MIT when he met Aurelio Peccei in Italy. At that time, Peccei had already founded the Club of Rome, whose members were worried about the limits to the natural resources that the Earth could provide. They were trying to understand what the consequences would have been for humankind. From what Peccei wrote, it seems clear that he was seeing the situation mostly in Malthusian terms; thinking that the human population would have been growing until reaching the resource limits, and then stay there, kept in check by famines and epidemics. The main concern of Peccei and of the Club of Rome was to avoid human suffering by ensuring a fair distribution of what was available.

The encounter with Forrester changed this vision in ways that, perhaps, neither Peccei nor any of the Club members would have imagined. In the 1960s, Forrester's models were already well advanced. Based on a completely new method of calculation that Forrester had dubbed "system dynamics," the models were able to take into account how the many variables of a complex system interacted with each other and changed in time.

The result was the study that the Club of Rome commissioned to Forrester and to his research group: simulate the future of humankind over a time range of more than a century, all the way to 2100. Forrester himself prepared a complete study with the title "World Dynamics" that was published in 1971. A group of Forrester's students and coworkers prepared a more extensive study titled "The Limits to Growth" that became a true intellectual revolution in 1972.

Forrester's system dynamics provided results that proved that Malthus had been an optimist. Far from reaching the limits to growth and staying there, as Malthus had imagined, the human civilization was to overshoot the limits and keep growing, only to crash down, badly, afterward. The problem was not just that of a fair distribution of the available resources, but to avoid the collapse of the whole human civilization. The calculations showed that it was possible, but that it required stopping economic growth. That was something that nobody, then as now, couldn't even imagine to do.

You know how things went: I told the story in my book "The Limits to Growth Revisited". Forrester's work was mostly ignored, but the better known "The Limits to Growth" study was not only rejected; it was actively demonized. The legend of the "wrong predictions" of the study was created and it spread so much that it is still widely believed. Yet, the intellectual revolution that was the creation of System Dynamics never died out completely and, today, world modeling is returning. We need to study the future in these times of great uncertainty. It is difficult, unrewarding, and often leading us astray. But we must keep trying.

Perhaps of Forrester's unknown achievement was of having inspired Isaac Asimov for the character of "Hari Seldon" in the famous "Foundation" series that Asimov wrote starting in the 1950s. We have no proof that Asimov ever met Forrester or knew his work, but they both lived in Boston at the same time, so it is at least possible. Then, Hari Seldon and Jay Forrester share similar traits: both are scientists who develop powerful methods for prediction the future. Seldon develops a field known as "Psychohistory" while Forrester developed "System Dynamics." In both cases, the equations predict that civilization will undergo a collapse. In both cases, the scientists are not believed by the Imperial authorities of their times, fictional or real.

In Asimov's story, Seldon goes on to create "Foundation" a planet where the achievements of civilization are kept alive and will be used to rebuild a new civilization after that the collapse of the old one. The plan succeeds in Asimov's fictional universe. In our case, the real Earth of the 21st century, nobody seems to have been able to create a safe haven for the achievements of civilization that we can use after the collapse. Seeing how things stand, maybe it is the only hope left?

But, maybe, Asimov wasn't directly inspired by Forrester for his Hari Seldon. Maybe he was just inspired by the archetype of the wise man that, in human history, has been played by people such as Merlin, Laozi, Kong Fuzi, Prince Gautama, Socrates, and many others. Perhaps Jay Forrester deserves to be listed among these wise men of old. Perhaps, the wisdom that Forrester brought to us will come handy in the difficult future that awaits us.

Forrester's achievements are many besides those of World Modeling. He developed a completely new magnetic computer memory that became the world standard, he developed a complete programming language (called "dynamo"), he is the originator of several fundamental ideas in system management: the "bullwhip effect," the concept of "Urban Dynamics"; of "Industrial Dynamics" of the "leverage points" in complex systems, and much more. A true genius of our times.

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted: how the quest for mineral resources is plundering the Planet" (Chelsea Green 2014)

Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog is dedicated to exploring the future of humankind, affected by the decline of the availability of natural resources, the climate problem, and the human tendency of mismanaging both. The future doesn't look bright, but it is still possible to do something good if we don't discount the alerts of the modern Cassandras. (and don't forget that the ancient prophetess turned out to be always right).

Above: Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Extracted

A report to the Club of Rome published by Chelsea Green. (click on image for a link)

Rules of the blog

I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it